/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>manga isn't reading

Spoilers for Ciconia, Umi, Higu.
You guys should stop the comparisons between Ciconia and Umineko. No, Ciconia won't be able to compete with Umineko because they're completely different scenarios, and obviously because one is complete and the other is not.
First, Ciconia isn't a murder mystery like Higurashi or Umineko, it's a mystery set in a sci-fi world. In Phase 1 Ryukishi explained how this world works, he explained almost all technologies and rules that support the A3W world, that's why there was so much world building instead of character development. This was necessary and very well done.
R07 mentioned in an interview that Ciconia aims for both mystery readers who want to solve it or those that do not, and that's already a big difference from Umineko, that urges you to solve it. You can't even understand Umineko completely without reading with someone who does, and even with the manga there's people still debating the truth like Italianon. This most likely isn't going to happen with Ciconia.
About the personality disorder, do you guys really think Ryukishi is such a bad writer he will create bullshit plots that uses characters or devices that never were presented in the story? Relevant personalities were already presented in the story, and if you're going to base your theories around them, they are: Meow, Chloevil, "Naima", MIYAO and Rukhi. No way every CPP will have dominant personalities like them, that's like expecting Ciconia to have 4 Phases with 50 characters or so.
And for the last but not least difference, both Umineko and Higurashi were closed cases that gave us clear questions. Onikakushi ends and you already know what you should be asking yourself: Why are people going crazy? Is Oyashiro-sama real? If not, what's causing it? Umineko ep 1 ends and you ask yourself: who's killing people in Rokkenjima, is Beatrice real? Ciconia ends... and what do you ask yourself? There's no clear question to be made, and the motive for it is that Phase 1 ends in a cliffhanger to Phase 2 instead of a "world ended scenario, let's review what happened and find out why". And I personally like this difference, but most people addicted to When They Cry wouldn't.
That is why I think, if you're asking yourself if you should or not read Ciconia, don't think you'll be having a similar experience to Umineko or Higurashi. Instead, think along the lines of RGD and Higanbana. Even more so because Ciconia seems to delve in a lot of topics that were discussed in RGD in Higanbana.

>>26836397
She likes playing otome games and prefers reading manga than watching anime though, so the slower pace isn't an issue itself.

>>26768047
Only korean mudhut dwellers were illiterate back then. Japan has always had a high literacy rate, in fact after WW2 the murricans were toying with abolishing kanji altogether but they found out that Japan had a higher literacy rate than the US at the time, so they instead compiled the joyou kanji.
Kanji isn't as bad as no-rep EOPs on here make it out to be, rote memorization through anki and reading manga was enough for me, learning the grammar and intonation took longer.

>>26675154

Her voice isn't as creepy as it was in her older videos, and now it just sounds kinda like an uncanny granny of sorts. You get used to it soon enough.

The main draw to her is her explanations, which are fairly spot on. She presents Japanese as a fairly logical language, so long as it is taken as a whole, rather than being described piece-mail as it relates to English. She uses a bottom up approach to explain Japanese in terms of other Japanese.

Some of her non-structure related videos are helpful for learning how to approach learning via immersion. She's' generally against core vocab decks, instead recommending to build a single Anki deck that is continuously added onto with vocabulary that one encounters while reading manga, watching anime with j-subs, and other areas one is immersed in.

She's very adamant about the fact that you should be using Japanese to consume media you enjoy, because if you aren't, then why are you learning the language in the first place? People learn English because they have to. If we want to learn Japanese, it should be because we need it. In other words, all of those VNs and games and doujins you've wanted to read, but can't because you don't know enough Japanese... you should read anyways. And whenever you find a word you don't know, throw it into your Anki.

Her videos provide clarity on the structure of the language and suggest a method of learning the vocab that is enjoyable and serves the purpose of why you are learning the language in the first place.

>>26535635
until i got to n1 i mostly just read, wasn't interested in anime at all and honestly wasn't that interested in japanese media. i only started learning japanese because my online friend did and he wanted me to join him and he told me what to do (rtk etc) i actually enjoyed doing rtk cuz im autistic so i finished it in like a month and didn't know any hiragana or japanese words.

i remember almost quitting while learning hiragana cause i found then harder to remember than individual kanji lmfao. i think i read through tae kim and tried reading some yotsubato and dragon quest 8 at that point (i remember mining 腰蓑 as my first word and being upset because 蓑 isn't in rtk1).

then i just worked thru core6k and sporadically read shit. up until n1 i probably read a total of like 160vols of manga (mostly jojo and berserk) and partially reading a few books and a lot of random shit but mostly textbook materials like dojg and kanzen master. i thought i was pretty good at japanese cuz i literally almost never engaged with it in a serious way until i went to japan for student exchange i was just playing videogames all day and doing anki for years but then i realized i couldn't understand spoken japanese at all and was just decoding written stuff with grammar knowledge

after that i forced myself to watch anime and read more and got into it more seriously. most of my ability has come in the last 2 years but since i already knew pretty much all the grammar shit on some level i knew i just needed a lot of exposure to actually turn it into proper language ability. im still pretty shit tho im just better than people like quiz cuz i had a headstart on them

sorry to say but oshimi shuzo is n5 at most and yea manga isn't reading

>>25665036
Aqua, with the pandemic I found myself watching more videos on youtube and friends started sending videos and more videos of a variety of vtubers, and Aqua's design was so cute I started watching her videos, I liked that she plays APEX, and she isn't that bad either at the game so it doesn't hurt like Coco's stream yesterday.
I saw her karaoke streams and liked her singing voice too.
I do watch Pekora/Okayu/Matsuri/Pikamee when they stream too, but Aqua is my top priority. Also vtubers became the push I needed to learn japanese, before I didn't have the drive to do it, I wasn't really interested in playing untranslated VNs or reading untranslated manga or doujins.
Thank you Aqua.

cheapest tablet that isn't complete fucking garbage i can get here is 200 euros. id use it for literally nothing other than reading manga and im not sure if i'm actually gonna read it or get tired of it in a week.

love this new "reading with the help of hover dictionaries isn't reading" meme
it's even better than the manga isn't reading meme

this shit is actually gonna make newbies insecure about using hover dictionaries and they will manually looks shit up on Jisho lmao

>>25570007
i dont think they hate it on so much as repeat the "manga isn't reading" meme indefinitely lol

>>25033248
manga isn't reading

So, after working my way through Genki 1+2, Shin Kazen Master N4, Tae Kim's guide and 5 chapters of Tobira, I was pretty burned out from doing textbooks. My way of practising reading comprehension up until now was reading whatever is included in the reading sections of the books and NHK Easy.

So I got myself some raw manga. I got SoL manga and harem manga as I heard those are easier to read. Naturally, I kept my expectations low as I knew I won't be able to understand all of it. I thought my biggest hurdle would have been constantly looking vocab and I was correct to some extent in that regard.

Yes, I do have to look up words every sentence but I don't mind that. However, my comprehension utterly sucks. Which is weird because 80% of the grammar I come across isn't foreign to me and I'm able to recognize the patterns and yet I can only understand about 50% of what I read.

So far I only finished one volume and I'm getting into the second one. The first one I understood about 70% of it but that's because I watched the anime so I had some idea of what was going on. I'm into my second one and not even done with the first chapter and I'm completely lost. And it's just your typical harem stuff.

At this point, I don't know what to do. Do I just give up and hit the books and then try again? Or do I continue to bang my head against the wall?

So I've been trying to read more recently, and was wondering what 'reading immersion' actually is.

I have two ideas of what it could be, but im not sure which one is right since there isn't any info about it.

A. Reading text and just trying to understand what I can see, no looking up words and piecing sentences together.

B. Actively going through and looking up definitions for words, even when its literally every couple words in an effort to piece a sentence together.

I may be asking a stupid question here, but active reading using subtitles and watching a show feels like A, whereas trying to read a manga or book im looking up a lot of words (Which essentially feels like sentence mining, not reading immersion) feels like situation B.

Am I overthinking this? Probably overthinking but some clarity would help, thanks!

>>24537235
I guess in the end it’s just a difference of how we think. To me it’s no different from a whodunnit novel that didn’t provide the solution, but the author then reveals the answer at a later date. For instance, imagine if in Agatha Christie’s book “And Then There Were None” that the confession bottle had not yet been found. Then, for the 10th anniversary of the book, Agatha Christie released a new edition of the book that came with an epilogue in which the confession bottle was found. It in no way diminishes the value and meaning of the original work. The reader can still theorize and experience the original work the same way. They can of course forgo reading that epilogue if they want to continue theorizing on their own, but when talking about their theory with others, there’s no way to ignore the epilogue. The answer is there to show you the fruits of your labours. All that postulating and theorizing, you can check your answer and see how well you did. That’s what the manga is to me. It adds to the original experience and makes it much more fun in the end. We think to arrive at an end—this isn’t college philosophy, it’s a mystery with a solution.
I even think different in regards to you’re A/B example. The answer was always B, but there was enough room for people to wiggle in their postulated A. To some that B might’ve looked blurry and appeared to look like an 8. The author just came along and said, “It’s definitely not A or 8.”

>>24206612
I understand your problem. After learning the kana and doing TK I had difficulty reading most stuff, so I lost interest, gave up, only to come back later. And was basically "learning" on and off, I tried Anki but I would always give up after a few days. Manga was a pain to read since you can't just select words and paste them into a dictionary. And most other content was either artificial or boring.

At a certain point I simply couldn't care about learning Japanese anymore and started reading what I wanted to read, in this case the WN of 転生したら剣でした (aka sword dad). It's written in a very simple manner. I'd abuse the shit out of yomichan, trying to understand as much as a could, doing only basic grammar lookups if needed, and ignoring anything that was too difficult or would take too much time to decipher, in the hope that at the very least this would still be better than MTL.
To my surprise after a while I started to get a natural feel for basic Japanese grammar and could understand basic words without yomichan. After that I started being more attentive about my yomichan usage because at a certain point it will become a crutch. And my understanding of japanese improved steadily. Eventually I removed yomichan.

At this point I can read most WN trash, I can go without having to look up anything for multiple paragraphs to 1~2 things per paragrap depending on the difficulty.

I started doing this maybe 1-2 years ago and read pretty much every day. You could probably be faster than me since I'm lazy and overused yomichan too much. But the great thing about this method was that I was having fun and was doing stuff I would be doing if I could already read jap instead of staying in the safety of tutorial island of boring artificial content or Anki grinding.

You see, the only way to get better at reading is by reading. Your brain isn't a a computer that will input japanese into an algorithm and does database lookups. No amount of anki grinding will help if you don't have a feel for japanese. So first you have to cultivate that feel. However most content is either too hard or too artificial for a beginner, but by abusing yomichan you can lower that difficulty significantly, ignoring vocab and only having to focus on cultivating that feel. And you'll still get some vocab for free.

It's not like I think Anki cards would be completely useless, but the most common words and grammar are so common you don't need Anki for them.
Anki could be useful for those words where you're like "I know I've looked this word up before more than once, but I still can't remember it.". And for words that you only see once or twice, they're probably not worth remembering as an intermediate learner. Still, I'm to lazy for Anki and I still improve.

I didn't realise russia had this much of a fujo community, but I guess after china I shouldn't be surprised.
>>24172552
>This inspires me to be more diligent in my JP training against dekinaichan.

Same here. I'm actually feeling my progress recently cause I started reading a certain manga in raw form because the fan translator isn't doing it anymore and it's been easier than expected.

>>23832624
Yes and no. When I have ~9 good chapters out of 10, like in Chaos;Head, it'd be stupid to hate the entire game for it. But reading the other routes isn't very interesting thanks to that, and is probably not happening anymore.

A well done ending has a lot of power. But Japanese media is really bad with that in general, partly because Manga getting axed or Anime getting original endings being common, but also with VNs that should in theory not have those issues. So absolutely requiring something well done would make it next to impossible to enjoy these works. I also got fairly used to it pretty early with jrpgs as well. Tri-Ace for example is pretty well known for really questionable endings. (i.e. Radiata Stories' 30 second cutscene being everything)

>>23814283
One manga chapter is virtually nothing; you should be aiming to read a lot more than that. If you don't find reading manga fun, consume something else instead that you feel more compelled to spend your time on.

Contrary to what the Krashen cultists here will say, studying grammar isn't completely worthless, but there isn't really any good reason to recommend Imabi. If you want something to refresh and reinforce the contents of Tae Kim, VJG is a good resource. If you're looking for something more comprehensive, you want either the DoJG Anki deck or HJGP Anki deck. DoJG goes into a lot more technical detail, whereas HJGP is more simple and concise while covering more grammar.

In any case, it's worth keeping in mind that the bulk of what you truly learn and internalize will come from your input, so that should be your focus. If you can only spend time on either grammar or input, the choice should always be input.

>>23787499
Right, but the goal here isn't to "know" the kanji, it's to be able to recognize the shapes in the kanji and reproduce them effortlessly (as the tripfaq so eloquently put it). The act of writing is itself a mnemonic device that you should be able to incorporate into your vocabulary studies. The kanji should become hooks onto which you hang your vocabulary words, which have concrete sounds and meanings, allowing you to become literate. With basic literacy you can begin to absorb the grammar from written texts, which should enable you to expand your vocabulary even further.
Trying to learn Japanese just by listening and immersion is great and all, but there's a big difference between picking up the language while being actively coached and criticized by native speakers, and trying to do it just by watching anime and "reading" manga as seems to be the latest fad around these parts. And good luck trying to work through grammar books and pick up vocabulary while reading if you are seeing every kanji for the first time as you go along.

>>23732979
Well that depends, reading some doujinshi or manga isn't that difficult to learn but funtioning in daily live or reading newspapers, even after 10-20 years of living in japan you still encounter stuff you can't read.

>>23125454
but manga isn't reading

>>23040368
manga isn't reading

Spent like 4 hours a couple nights ago doing one final pass through anonymous core 5k and finally deleted all the words I already knew as well as English loanwords and the least common words. There's only 580 words left which is a huge relief because I've wanted to get back to mining for the past 3 months (but I also wanted to knock out more of the "most common" words so I kept doing this deck).

And in case anyone was considering anonymous core 5k I wouldn't recommend it because it seems to be similar to core6k in that it has a ton of words which may be common in newspapers but you won't see that often in VNs or manga, or at least that's been my experience. It also has a ton of English loanwords with obvious meanings. These decks seem so inefficient that a hypothetical vncore 3k might allow you to understand more of a VN despite having almost half the words. You might think the difference between a hypothetical vncore 3k and anon core 5k isn't a big deal since it's just 2k words and those words will be useful to know eventually anyway. But at 20 words a day in anki that would take 3 months to cover, and for someone like me who still sucks and wants to understand more stuff faster, I think people are way better off mining than finishing something like core6k.

I know this is obvious to a lot of you but I didn't realize the difference would be that large (the words I see most often while reading and the words I encounter in anon core5k that is).